DISCO'S GOOD OLD DAZE TWO NEW STUDIO 54 MOVIES RECALL WHEN CLUBS WERE OUR STRONG SUIT

They said disco died, but nobody put it in writing. ssss This summer at the movies we get Studio 54 redux and redux again. Two movies, "The Last Days of Disco," and "54" get us past the doorman. Our moment has finally come, and it only took 20 years. Director Whit Stillman doesn't call the club in "The Last Days of Disco" Studio 54, but it is though he means also to evoke other "velvet rope" venues like Xenon and El Morocco. Still, the infamous Studio 54 bust in which scads of cash were found below stairs, and co-owners Ian Schrager and the late Steve Rubell went to jail is a pivotal plot point in "Disco," which hits theaters Friday. In the movie, the club actually the interior of a Jersey City movie house provides a defining moment for the prototype yuppie characters. "The Last Days of Disco" completes Stillman's trio of romantic comedies, following "Metropolitan" (1990) and "Barcelona" (1994). In each, he took privileged sons and daughters of the WASP kingdom Connecticut and the upper East Side and examined them in different environments. Alice (Chloe Sevigny) and Charlotte (Kate Beckinsale) are Hampshire graduates who both work in publishing and room together in Manhattan in the early '80s. Their anointed-by-birth consorts are the young men they knew at Harvard. Des McGrath (Chris Eigeman) has an inside job at the club. Rather than strictly pair off, they group, then regroup, depending on who's acting on his/her lust for whom. Story grows on you Aside from the story elements, what's also notable is how tame, even lame, the action in the club seems. There's the occasional painted body, the lady in leopard, some cocaine, but this club is mostly crowded with the city's professional-class-in-waiting the associates, assistants and clerks who by the '90s would hold key positions in advertising, law and publishing. That's how Stillman remembers it from life he first went to Studio 54 in December 1979, escorting the woman who became his wife. "They were the main group paying for drinks. They weren't the ones getting the drink chips," he says. Stillman, who limited his clubgoing in favor of staying home to write the short stories that were then his "nighttime avocation," believes that as time passed, the story of the clubs has grown steamier and seamier than the reality ever was. "In writing about those places, in retrospect people put together amazing anecdotes as if they happened all on one night, every night," he says. "Objectively, the clubs were more normal, though subjectively they were special. The feeling was so great because you had gotten in. I remember being very apprehensive the first night because I thought it was going to be very dangerous, very on the edge. It was exciting but it wasn't really shocking.

" On the other hand, it sounds as if "54" will deliver Studio 54 precisely as we think we remember it. In his first feature film, director Mark Christopher tells the story of a Jersey City boy (Ryan Phillippe) who, in looking for lights brighter than the local strobe, scores a job at "54.

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" And there, life happens. "Our ambition was not to answer moral questions, not to make a statement about that period," says producer Richard Gladstein. "We're jumping in in the middle, capturing this club on this street in this city where a lot of the world collided, making it a very special place.

" Andy's gang Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and Halston are represented by look-alikes. Mike Myers is the late Rubell, Salma Hayek the coat-check girl, Lauren Hutton the blueblood and Sela Ward the habituee socialite who introduces Jersey Boy to her celebrity-riddled circle. "She's really a composite of those upper East Side women who slept all day, partied all night," says Ward, who did time at Studio 54 herself during her modeling days in New York. "She takes this guy under her wing, grooms and dresses him, and takes him around.

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" Of course, that's not all. This is the story of one boy's corruption in an era suffused with hedonism. Ward recalls that it really was as torrid as all that. "Do you remember the scrim?

" asks the actress, who is soon to deliver her second child. "There was this divine couch behind it and people lounged there groping each other like something out of `Caligula.

' " We're not likely to see the like of 54 again, except onscreen. "If it were going on now when we know about the repercussions of drugs, know about AIDS, it would seem very dangerous, excessive, irresponsible," says Gladstein. "If you walked in on it now you would definitely notice that boundaries were being crossed. But back then? It was wild, it was freeing, it was great.